


i think i made you up inside my head.

by thewinterbecca



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, she made me do this she made me post this., this is lizzie's fault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 06:12:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3239258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewinterbecca/pseuds/thewinterbecca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>au for t.r.a.c.k.s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i think i made you up inside my head.

( _Come back. Even as a shadow,  
_ _even as a dream_.)

Grant Ward was meticulously trained. He went through hell and back and he survived. He was a combat man, a soldier, a spy. 

He was a lot of things.

Grant Ward wasn't a cold man, but he taught himself not to feel; not to care. There was one point in his life where he cared _too_ much, as a child, so he shut that part of himself off and buried it away. You have to bury it away if you want to survive. 

 And then he let a little light in.

 Desperately, he tried not to. He tried to avoid her. He tried to shut himself down once again. It used to be as easy as breathing. 

 (Close your eyes and count to ten and all the world drops dead.)

 He tried, he tried, he tried. 

 He wasn’t sure exactly when she had him. He thinks it was somewhere between the first time she took initiative in her training and when she sank his battleship. Or maybe even before that. He wasn’t sure and if he dwelled on it too long, it burned another hole in his heart.

The when wasn’t what mattered, anyway. Not really. It was the who that mattered in the end. The who that stole his heart and gave him hope.

Hope he thought wasn’t even an option. 

Grant Ward was not a man with hope. Grant Ward was a man with a past and a murky future. Grant Ward was a man with too much blood on his hands to deserve any hope.

And, yet. 

Skye was all that and more. She was stolen looks, little quips. She was pop culture references that he didn’t know a damn thing about because when would he watch The Big Lebowski? What care did he have in Captain America trivia? But she made him want to be interested in those things. 

She made him want to _be._

Be more. Be so much more than he was. More than a solider, more than a spy. 

More than his past.

Death is something that Grant is familiar with. Death is an old companion of his, walking next to him every day, side by side; a silent partner. 

Death does not surprise Grant Ward. 

As a soldier, you know your days are numbered. You know that tomorrow isn’t a guarantee. Your life could be snuffed out in many different ways when you do what Grant does. He has taken lives in many different ways over the years. He has spilled blood in many different countries. He has seen the life go out of someone’s eyes: here one second and gone the next. 

Yet the thought never crossed his mind about Skye. She was a constant. She would always be there at the end of a mission with a smile or a quip. “You know, for a second there, I thought I would have to find a new supervising officer,” she once told him, the smirk on her face rueful and telling. 

She _thought_ she would but only for a second. Because the Team was forever. Nothing happened to the team. They came back from everything. _Everything._ From a weird alien virus. From a firefight. From an underground Siberian prison. The team was a constant. Skye was a constant.

(She was supposed to be a constant.)

Grant never understood the concept of “don’t take anything for granted’ because he never had anything to _take_ for granted before. Not until her. 

And oh, did he take her for granted.

He had seen a lot of blood in one place many times in his life but he wasn’t sure he had ever seen that much blood come out of one person. It was everywhere; drenching her clothes, drenching his. No one could survive that amount of blood loss. He knew that. Deep down, he did. But that didn’t stop him from hoping. 

It didn’t stop the treacherous thoughts filling his mind, even though he should have known better. If his past had taught him anything it was that there’s no room for hope inside of a man like him.

And yet.

And yet he hoped even as they wheeled her away. He hoped as the minutes turned into hours and they were still working on her. 

How many specialists and doctors did SHIELD have under its belt? Surely one could fix Skye. Surely this wasn’t the end.

He hoped even as he was told the fight was over. He hoped even as Simmon’s sobbed into Fitz’s shoulder. He hoped, he hoped, he hoped.

If Coulson could come back from the dead, Skye could too, right? 

It took a week for it to fully hit Grant that she was gone. And even then… even then. 

More than anything, Grant wished that he was the robot Skye claimed him to be in the first couple of weeks of knowing him. He wish he felt nothing, because maybe then her absence wouldn’t be a constant gaping hole in his chest. Maybe he would be able to not tremble at the whisper of her name. 

(Maybe. Everything is a maybe. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I’ll tell her tomorrow. There's always a tomorrow, right? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.)

Grant was never much of a sleeper. He was a get up at dawn and get things done kind of man and that was how it always worked. Not anymore. Because when he closed his eyes, when he finally fell asleep, his nightmares were now replaced with dreams of her. Sure, some were nightmares too but was it really a nightmare when he got to see her again? He didn’t think so. He would take what he could get. 

He went about his days in a haze. He was less of a person than he ever had been in his life but somehow so much more. She gave him so much but she was ripped away and now… And now.

Now no one was the same. Fitz never left the lab. Jemma just couldn’t get into her work anymore. Coulson locked himself in his office. Even May turned to work now more than ever.

They were a team fractured.

The shadows looked like her. The wind sounded like her. But she was gone.

And Grant Ward would never be the same again. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i repeat: lizzie made me do it.
> 
> the first lil quote thing is — Euripides, Herakles  
> the title is from sylvia plath


End file.
